Over the years, I actually have come up with a zillion ideas for “things” that I wanted to patent. Sometimes later those things would turn out to be commercially valuable and I kick myself later. Other times those ideas never panned out.

One of my oldest patent ideas was many years ago when we all started self-service gas stations (yes a long time ago). I kept jamming my gas cap into the handle so I did not have to hold open the gas while fueling. I figured that a well-designed “H-Shaped” piece of plastic would do the trick much better than the gas cap which was round and kept popping out. You could put logos on it and sell it for a buck – all I wanted was five cents for each one sold! Like the pet rock, this seemed like a sure way to get a nice steady income.

So I went and talked to a patent lawyer at the university I was working at the time and pitched the idea – after all – they would do all the paperwork and we would share in the profits.

The patent attorney sat down with the bright 20-something kid and did everything he could to try to blow a hole in my patent using prior art – he suggested that such a thing might already be patented to hold windows up, or used to keep multiple items separate while shipping or even be part of a screen-door patent. Pretty much he told me that it was very very unlikely that my idea was novel and that after we wasted all the school’s money on the application we would lose. He even went so far as to say there was no market for the device.

Dejected and rejected I gave up trying to patent my ideas – the prior art barrier was just too high – I could not even get past the first “freely provided” attorney.
I wonder of course, if I had been paying the attorney if the conversation would have been quite different – right now – I would live in a mansion and you all would be using your “Chuck Pumper’s” emblazoned with Nascar logos and right next to the counter at all the best gas stations in the country.

So my more recent approach (now that we have the internet) is to just blog my patents. At least when someone makes a killing and files a patent – I can say to my friends – see I patented that years earlier on my blog.

My most recent blog-patent (Feb 2006) is retractible iPod earphones and a slightly redesigned iPod shuffle. I have a picture and everything.

Why Patents *work* for Things

So here is the key notion – each of these two ideas are describable.

You can look at my 200 word descriptions and a cell phone picture picture and (a) quickly understand what the invention *is* to the point where you could design and manufacture the invention and (b) instinctively know if you infringe on my patent or (c) quickly know if your prior patent or invention blows me out of the water.

These are *widgets* – describable things – the things that the patent office is trying to empower invention and innovation to allow these ideas to be revealed as early as possible (think how much better a world this would be if I revealed my pump-o-matic in the 1970’s – but without a patent I kept the idea hidden for over 30 years). Patents are designed to encourage the revealing of the innovation and establishing a publicly validated (sort of like a government-sanctioned blog) time when the innovation happened.